Friday, January 13, 2012

From the Attic: Why D&D is the way it is; Levels and Hit Dice.

During the rampup to the next edition of D&D, I figure it would be useful to look at how D&D changed over the different editions. Today I look at the origins of levels and what they meant.

Levels started with the Chainmail Miniature Wargame. First off you have to remember that in Chainmail for the ordinary fighting man 1 hit = 1 kill. In the fantasy supplement to Chainmail there was the Hero and the Super Hero. A Hero was worth four fighting men, and took four hit to kill. The Super Hero was worth eight fighting men, and took eight hit to kill.

When Gygax developed D&D he changed the 1 hit to a 1d6 roll. Likewise for the number of hits a character could take he changed that to 1d6 roll and called them hit points. The three original classes varied in modifiers to the 1d6 roll with Magic-users being the worst, and Fighters the best.

In general a level in OD&D could be looked at as a multiplier. A 4th level character was four times as effective as a first level character, and a 8th level character was 8 times as effective.

2 comments:

Cheese whiz Rob, you of all people should know Arneson did that, not Gygax. It was one of the first changes he made.

"Likewise for the number of hits a character could take he changed that to 1d6 roll and called them hit points."

Yeah that was Gygax. Arneson started the use of Hit Points but used a fixed amount that he varied as he saw fit. Twas Gygax who added the idea of using Hit Dice (i.e. damage dice) as a means of generating random HP.

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.